


With our backs to the wall(The darkness will fall)

by MessedUpMessages



Series: Morgan [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Deppression, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-07 07:01:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17361227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MessedUpMessages/pseuds/MessedUpMessages
Summary: Pepper doesn’t know what tony and peter do in the barn for those long hours every weekend.





	With our backs to the wall(The darkness will fall)

**Author's Note:**

> this makes me sad  
> title from ready aim fire by imagine dragons

Tony lets out a breath, wiping a smear of grease from his forehead with the back of his hand before returning to his project. From across the workbench peter laughs and tony looks up, perplexed.

“What are you laughing at kid?”

Peter smooths his face out and refuses to meet his eyes. 

“Nothing. It's just, you cleaned your face using the hand that’s covered in grease. It kinda- ah- made it worse.”

“Oh for fucks sake-”

Tony drops his tablet on the table and swipe ineffectually at the black now covering most of his face. It doesn’t work. He goes to grab for the hem of his shirt before remembering that’s dirty, too. He gives up and goes back to the metal contraption in front of him.

He’ll get cleaned up when they go in.

 

By the end of the day he’s finished his project, and peter has upgraded his webs, again. Peter heads back to the city with his car and tony goes inside the house, coming up behind pepper and touching her shoulder as she rinses tomatoes in the sink. She turns and inspects the thing he has proffered in his hands.

“What is it?”

He flicks off the lights then turns on the macheine.

A thousand stars and galaxies and nebulas dance over the walls, the cupboards, the floors, the ceiling. A galaxy spins over peppers face as she looks around in awe.

He doesn’t look at the stars. He’s seen them already. The only one he cares about is in front of him.   
  


When peter returns the next weekend, eager and full of stories of the latest week of school, pepper meets them out front before they vanish into the barn. She’s standing on the porch, arms crossed over her now prominent stomach, watching the way tony’s eyes linger on peter as he animatedly explains the newest addition to his web shooters to pepper. She knows he’s thinking about what happened on Titan. He hasn’t told her, but sometimes he wakes up at night, crying, screaming.

It's not unusual, anyone who went through what he did would have nightmares. Sometimes she wonders if the whole world doesn’t lie awake at night, plagued with nightmares, thinking about how they watched their families vanish before them. 

Hers are about losing tony.

 

They’re all broken, but they’re healing, slowly, and part of that is knowing that thanos is gone. The other part is watching their loved ones live,

Sometimes tony looks at the teenager next to him and just watches. Because sometimes he can't believe he's alive, that he’s standing there, breathing. Talking. Laughing. Because sometimes all he can remember is Titan, and sometimes he can feel the warm weight of peters fragile body pressed into his chest, trembling with fear. He was shaking, cowering in the face of inevitable doom. And sometimes tony can hear his shaky words, his pleading for help. The kid never even used tony’s first name, even in his last moments.

And then he remembers that they won, that they brought everyone back. Sometimes it takes a while, takes an hour of tony reliving every reunion that took place when they got back to earth.

Steve embracing bucky like he thought he would never see him again, then putting his arms around barnes neck and kissing him.

Peter clinging to the green lady like he would never let her go.

Loki grudgingly allowing thor to envelope him in his arms.

T’challa hugging shuri for the longest time, the teen sobbing into her brothers shoulder.

Wanda kissing vision desperately, holding him close.

Peter lunging across the helipad for his aunt, falling into her embrace.

Pepper kissing him a hour later when he gets out of the latest meeting to find her standing in the hall, hands over her mouth, almost in tears.

The living and the dead, reunited.

So yeah, tony takes those moments in the barn. He takes them and grips them tight. They are his balm when he wakes up in the night. Often pepper is already awake, tortured by her own personal hell. They match, he thinks, their scars. Both dream about loss.

 

When morgan is born, peter is the first one to visit. Before she was born he would never stop asking about her, and now that she’s here, in the flesh, his chatter only gets worse. 

He doesn't ask to hold her, not yet(probably because pepper almost never let's her daughter out of her or tony’s arms), but he watches her for hours, laughing at every little thing, every noise.

He acts like an older sibling, pepper thinks, and it's wonderful. Peter is a child forced to grow up before he needed to. He fought in a war that claimed everyone he held dear, then brought them back. He has nightmares too.

His scars match theirs.

And pepper wonders if he is infatuated with morgan because she is the embodiment of what they fought for. They fought for her, for the hope of continued life.

It's a good cause, and pepper thinks all three of them would die for it.

It's worth it.


End file.
